That drone that recently flew over your backyard could have been piloted by a criminal casing your property, a company with an interest in real estate, a neighbor with a new hobby—or the police searching for a suspect.
How can you know who is spying from above? If the unmanned aircraft is a Washoe County Sheriff’s Office drone, the quadcopter’s flight path can be traced on the county’s public transparency portal, which also displays statistics of the aerial deployments over time. The county’s real-time flight-path dashboard is among the few in the nation with that much detail about drone operations available to the public, open-records advocates said.
The Reno Police Department also has a real-time online dashboard displaying statistics of its drone deployments and may soon add maps of flight paths like Washoe County’s portal. The more information that is available to the public, the more people will understand and trust the drone program, said Officer Hunter Mercurio, a Reno Police spokesman.
“When people see a drone nearby, they will be able to check our portal and see if it’s a police drone and see the flight path,” Mercurio said. “We’ll continue to expand transparency when we can.”
Reno, Washoe County and the Sparks Police Department have “docked” drones, which are stationed on rooftops and can automatically fly to the scene of a police call within minutes using GPS. Pilots miles away can fly those machines remotely. The unmanned aerial systems are part of the national Drone as a First Responder (DFR) initiative. That program is poised for exponential growth since the Federal Aviation Administration streamlined the approval process for operating drones beyond pilots’ visual line of sight.
Smaller quadcopters, kept in police vehicles, can be deployed in the field by officers who are licensed drone pilots.
While Reno and Washoe County make their drone-flight information easily available to the public, Sparks requires the filing of formal open-records requests to access data about its DFR program, including its police drone policy document. Reno and Washoe County have their drone policies posted online.
Although Sparks recently launched a new city website, no drone data will be included, said Withanee Milligan, a Sparks spokeswoman.
“While it might be an initiative we consider in the future, we currently don’t have anything similar to Reno’s dashboard in reference to drones,” she wrote in an email to the RN&R.
The difficulty in getting what is clearly public information from Sparks baffled Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes internet civil liberties.
“It’s not a very complicated thing for them to provide that information publicly,” she said. “They have it in their system, a record of where each drone flew, and when and why. … When we see that agencies don’t have a (transparency) portal, that’s a bit of a red flag. Why don’t they just provide that information?”
Big Brother is flying
Wide differences in the transparency policies of police DFR programs are among the many challenges of rapidly advancing surveillance technology. In a nation where government and privately owned stationary cameras are everywhere, license plate readers like Flock collect every plate number that passes them, and rogue police officers have used Flock data to stalk ex-wives and others, the stealth and mobility of the flying eyes make a lot of folks even more nervous.
Drone cameras can see over walls, peer into high windows through telephoto lenses, find people in the dark by using infrared flashlights or detecting the heat of their bodies—and can potentially be used for mass surveillance. Civil libertarians also warn that police drone patrols can put specific “high crime” neighborhoods or minority communities under constant monitoring.
A Nevada law passed in 2015 prohibits the use of police drones for routine surveillance or patrols, and limits their flights to active police calls. The statute requires search warrants or the presence of emergency circumstances for a drone to be deployed for uses other than police dispatch calls.
Law-enforcement officers said the strict state law and their departments’ drone policies prevent civil-liberties abuses. They said police departments embrace the technology, because it is a gamechanger for dispatched police calls.
“The Drone as a First Responder program is very beneficial, because they can help either by preparing our officers for what to expect when going into a situation, or they can de-escalate a call completely where it may not even warrant police response,” said Mercurio.
To promote the value of police drones, local agencies occasionally post videos of their deployments on the internet. For example, the Reno Police Facebook page has clips of a suspect allegedly ditching drugs when stopped by police, and another video of the capture of an armed suspect who exited a vehicle and was allegedly hiding from officers. The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office posted a video of its drone locating people who were target-shooting near residences and later arrested.
A RN&R review of drone-deployment information from Reno Police and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office shows that the vast majority of the drone flights are related to minor crimes or incidents, as is the case nationally. The drone companies claim that police departments using the systems report canceling physical police responses on 20% to 30% of routine calls after aerial assessment proves units are not needed. The firms say the aircraft reach emergency scenes in about 90 seconds. In about seven months of operation, RPD drone flights have resulted in about 17% of police responses being cancelled, according to the city’s dashboard, which shows the quadcopters have reached the scene of police calls before other RPD units 63% of the time when the docked drones were deployed.
“It’s just been an extra set of eyes to really help us see things that maybe the officer on the ground can’t see, or help de-escalate a call to where we don’t even need to respond to that call,” Mercurio said. “So, it saves resources and time.”
Lipton said Nevada’s law is unique, but concerns about drones exceed the potential for warrantless searches or conducting intentional surveillance of random people.
“It’s good that Nevada has that law,” she said. “But how the drones can be used sort of depends on individual operation and individual policies. The concerns go far beyond whether they can see into backyards.”
Drone cameras capture images of wide swaths of the ground, Lipton said, even when operators route them away from homes. “There are a lot of other things that people need to be worried about when it comes to how drones are observing those areas, especially because at this point, video footage is easily subjected to additional analysis that people aren’t really aware of,” she said.
Drone technology advances so fast that laws and policies have trouble keeping up with the changes, she said. “There are still a lot of open questions about how that information gets stored and shared, and what it looks like to expunge information when it does get shared with other police departments.
“That’s a concern with drones and all forms of surveillance technology,” Lipton continued. “What is the (data) container holding this information, and what are the vulnerabilities of that container? We’ve seen that people who were not authorized to access that information can access that data sometimes, as we saw recently in San Francisco.”
In that example, live feeds and recordings from San Francisco Police Department drones were accidentally exposed on the open internet for several months. Security researchers discovered an improperly secured software link that broadcast real-time thermal and color camera operations, tracking data and pilot details publicly before being disabled.
“(At EFF), we talk a lot about how difficult it is to keep data in the container that you wanted to be in,” Lipton said. Once a police department’s information is shared with other agencies, she said, copies can be made, and “then that information is somewhere else the creator doesn’t know about, and it moves beyond the space where (the originator) thought it was contained.”
The three local police agencies, which each have contracts with different drone companies, say they expunge the videos after 30 days unless the footage is part of an open case. Videos are stored in the drone companies’ digital clouds rather than at police departments.
The difficulty in getting what is clearly public information from Sparks baffled Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes internet civil liberties.
Neither state law nor the police agencies’ individual drone policies have specific guidelines about sharing data with other jurisdictions, like police departments do with license-plate reader information. The Reno Police Flock Safety transparency portal, for example, has a list of hundreds of outside agencies with which RPD shares camera data.
“I don’t think it’s paranoia to think that, sans policy or state law, police departments have broad discretion to share data,” said Lipton, who has read the Nevada law and local agency policies regulating the use of drones, which she said contain a lot of vague language. “A lot can fall under the umbrella of ‘lawful purpose,’ and there’s a lot of wiggle room in phrases like ‘continuously monitor’ or even ‘conduct surveillance.’ Washoe County’s policy, for example, states that its drone data may be shared with other public-safety agencies for ‘legitimate investigative or public safety purposes.’”
Another concern about drone footage is that it can easily be integrated with data from other police and private camera networks, including license-plate readers like Flock, Lipton said.
Who guards the guardrails?
Sparks plans to replace its 47 Flock license-plate readers (Reno has 29 Flock cameras) with plate readers from Axon, the company that already provides body cameras, drones and other equipment to the city’s police department. The city also hosts a voluntary system that allows police to access private security cameras in the city. The city’s website describes the linking of private and government security cameras, which utilizes artificial intelligence, as a “force multiplier” for surveillance during emergencies and criminal activity.
Reno also has a camera-sharing network. The Reno and Sparks police departments share data at the Real-Time Information Center within the Reno Police Department. That facility “consolidates live video and data feeds from public and private cameras, body-worn cameras, sUAS (drones) and sensors into one unified interface,” according to the city’s press release.
Civil-liberties advocates say the growing number of drone programs, police agencies’ integration of camera data from multiple sources and the evolution of government camera systems are indicative of a blanket of surveillance coming down on communities.
Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, said public disclosure and strict laws prohibiting the misuse of government drones aren’t enough to curb civil-liberties violations. He noted that Nevada law rightly requires police to obtain court-issued search warrants to surveil any person or location where there is “a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“The biggest challenge with respect to that provision of law, as is the case with the advent of different types of technology—whether it’s drone usage, automatic license-plate readers, and so on—is that the actual understanding of how oversight works with respect to these technologies largely remains either incomplete or wholly fiction,” Haseebullah said.
Those provisions in the law rely on police to comply with the restrictions, he noted, but if officers break through those guardrails, the public wouldn’t be aware of the misuse. That’s because “law enforcement agencies are generally hesitant to release records. They’ll simply say they’re complying with the law and leave it at that,” he said.
Independent oversight, he said, solves the problem of police policing themselves.
“We have seen too many stories all across the country for far too many years of government agencies investigating themselves and finding no areas or no issues of misconduct.” Haseebullah said. “That is a reoccurring theme.”
Law-enforcement officials interviewed for this story acknowledged there is the potential for the abuse of any new technology, but said their internal systems guard against such misuse. The benefits of police drones far outweigh the potential for civil liberties violations, they said.
“The counterargument I would give, which is one I give consistently, is that civil liberties violations only ever occur under the guise of public safety,” Haseebullah said. “… There could be any number of narratives provided to justify almost any layer of civil-liberties violations or intrusion.”
As surveillance technology advances, he said, the threats to civil liberties increase. Even now, the legality of drone programs “remains dubious” due to their conflict with Fourth Amendment guarantees against warrantless search and seizure, he said.
“Invasiveness, intrusion and consistent surveillance around the clock—certainly the ability for a law-enforcement agency to, warrantlessly, potentially fly a drone over someone’s home—remains a very, very grave intrusion into one’s civil liberties overall,” Haseebullah said.
Nevada, he said, should have a “part-time regulatory structure” that can keep up with the exponential growth of surveillance technology. He noted that there’s nothing in state law that requires outside oversight of police drone operations.
“As drone technology becomes more sophisticated—drones become smaller, more nimble, easier on their end to capture imaging and video information—the layers of abuse that could be rampant are beyond reproach,” he said.
The public, Haseebullah said, should have full access to data about police use of drones in their communities, because “the only way that we will have accountability is with transparency.
“That means that all of these records need to effectively be shared for free to the public and to the requestor,” he said. “But, beyond that, there needs to be at least some layer of external oversight of all these surveillance apparatuses that exist.”